Curiosity endows the people who have it with a generosity in argument and a serenity in their own mode of life which springs from their cheerful willingness to let life take the form it will.
Interpretation
Curiosity leads to open-mindedness and a peaceful acceptance of life's unpredictability.
Alistair Cooke's quote suggests that curiosity enhances one's ability to engage in arguments generously and maintain a calm lifestyle. This state of mind is rooted in a cheerful acceptance of life’s unpredictable nature, fostering a willingness to embrace whatever comes, rather than resisting or trying to control it.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the value of curiosity in education.
More than anything else, though, to anyone who would write about it, golf offers a four-hour drama in two acts, which becomes memorable even in the tape-recorded reminiscenses of old champs, and which - in the hands of someone like Herb Wind - can become a piece of war correspondence as artfully controlled as Alan Morehead's account of Gallipoli.
Man has an incurable habit of not fulfilling the prophecies of his fellow men.
It has been an unchallengeable American doctrine that cranberry sauce, a pink goo with overtones of sugared tomatoes, is a delectable necessity of the Thanksgiving board and that turkey is uneatable without it.
A professional is someone who can do his best work when he doesn't feel like it.
Liberty is the luxury of self-discipline, that those nations historically who have failed to discipline themselves have had discipline imposed by others.
It is a wonderful tribute to the game or to the dottiness of the people who play it that for some people somewhere there is no such thing as an insurmountable obstacle, an unplayable course, the wrong time of the day or year.
There are times you will be given intuition, you just know something, and you can't explain it. Don't override it. Don't talk yourself out of it. That's the Creator giving you inside information.
Time is the most valuable asset you don't own.
Take it from Richard, poor and lame, What's begun in anger ends in shame.
What is called honors and dignities, and even honor and dignity, is generally fool's gold.
There is a level of grief so deep that it stops resembling grief at all. The pain becomes so severe that the body can no longer feel it. The grief cauterizes itself, scars over, prevents inflated feeling. Such numbness is a kind of mercy.
The writer can grow as a person or he can shrink. ... His curiosity, his reaction to life must not diminish. The fatal thing is to shrink, to be interested in less, sympathetic to less, desiccating to the point where life itself loses its flavor, and one’s passion for human understanding changes to weariness and distaste.
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